Before our drive to Gangtey we were blessed by a high monk on the terrace of Amankora Paro’s forecourt beneath a pristine powder blue sky. The mountains were twinkling with early morning freshness and Jomilaro looked particularly profound.

The drive to Gangtey takes you over the Black Mountains and up into a valley of intriguing beauty and tranquil pleasures. The valley floors are scattered with jungle foliage, winter barley, rice paddies and terraces of fruit trees, which step up into slopes of blue pine and deciduous forests, while monasteries and traditional Bhutanese farm dwellings frequently capture the eye.

On approach to the Gangtey Valley there is an almost disorienting landscape change. You ascend from densely forested mountainous terrain, crawling with an amalgam of flora, from the deciduous forest to the alpine, with a wealth of rhododendrons, junipers, magnolias, rare orchids and cascading drapes of ‘old man’s beard’, onto a plain of dwarf bamboo, the favoured fodder of yaks. You have, so it feels, gone above the clouds and, almost like a scene from Harry Potter, we gasped at two white eagles circling the dusk sky as we dipped down to our next glorious lodge.

Amankora lodge at Gangtey sits back within the clutches of the valley’s exquisite nature, allowing onlookers to absorb the intoxicating view. When entering the lodge’s sitting and dining area, the expansive wood and glass window that frames the vast valley is quite sensational, linking you instantly to this pristine land from a heavenly vantage point. You actually feel elated here.

We were fortunate to witness several rare black-neck cranes walking, toe-in-gluestyle on their sacred marshland, directly beneath the lodge before their skyward bound flight to Tibet for the summer. The atmosphere feels quite tangible here: you breathe it in and it clings to your very soul.

Another wonderful surprise, organised by Amankora that morning, was a meeting with the valley’s revered master, the Rinpoche Gangtey or Gangtey Trulku (the ninth reincarnation to bear this name) at his hallowed Gangtey Gonmpa, the monastery in view from the lodge. This is the only Nyingmapa monastery on the western side of the Black Mountains and the largest of its ilk in Bhutan. While it is still ‘work in progress’ here, it also houses a central tower of cosmic mandalas, a Wheel of Life, a depiction of Guru Rinpoche’s heaven and a rare interpretation of Shambala.

Each lodge, each landscape, each aura, will delight and deliver in a way that must be almost unique in this world because they are so intrinsically linked and yet they are also delightfully individual. The spas too, are simply sublime. Thus, with nature at its best, entwined into an inspiritingly evolved spirituality, plus Amankora looking after the rest, the result is something close to heavenly.

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